With the increasingly fierce competition in the employment market, entrepreneurship has gradually become a crucial approach for college students to expand their employment channels. However, there are numerous factors influencing college students’ entrepreneurial intentions. Employing the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method, this study takes 124 college students from Chinese finance and economics universities as the research sample, and explores the multiple combined paths through which different combinations of variables affect college students’ entrepreneurial intentions from the dual perspectives of internal cognition and external environment, such as attitude toward the behavior, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, innovation and entrepreneurship education, and government policy support. The results indicate that there are four configuration paths to enhance college students’ entrepreneurial intentions, namely the “policy incentive-attitude dominated” configuration, the “innovation and entrepreneurship education empowered” configuration, the “external support deficiency compensation” configuration, and the “multi-subject collaboration” configuration, with each configuration playing a differentiated role.
Fu et al. (2026) studied this question.